ZOONIVERSE Meriton, Royston Francis; Graham, Gary; Cox, Joe; - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

THE EVOLUTION OF ORGANIZATIONAL CAPABILITIES IN THE ZOONIVERSE

Presented by: Dr Royston Meriton MSc(Eng.); MSc

Management; PhD Business and Economics Meriton, Royston Francis; Graham, Gary; Cox, Joe; Masters, Karen; Oh, Eun Young; Greenhill, Anita

Capabilities Unpacked

Capabilities are emergent Emerging stable patterns of action, behaviour, or practice

(Eisenhardt and Martin 2000)

Capacity to generate action (Cohen et al. 1996) Individuals, processes and structure (Felin et al. 2012) Study of transition (and transmission) mechanisms between

ancestors and descendants (Winter, 2012: 1403)

Contextually entrenched within the structural, social and

cultural aspects of the firm (Grewal and Slotegraaf, 2007)

Capabilities as the interplay between the emergent powers

• f structure, culture and agency (Meriton, 2015)

What is the Morphogenetic Approach?

Some Core Ideas

 Critical Realism  Realist Ontology  Relativist epistemology  Emergence  Reflexivity  Internal Conversation  Analytical Dualism

What is the Morphogenetic Approach cont..?

 Builds on analytical dualism  Structure always predates

agents

 Agents are placed involuntary

in structured positions (T1)

 Reflexively, agents act (T2-T3)

to reproduce or elaborate structure (T4)

 Unintended and/or intended

consequences of agents action structure context of action for agents in the future

Structural conditioning Social interaction Structural elaboration T1 T2 T3 T4

Source: Archer 1995: 193

Individual Resources Structure Culture Position-practices (Individual’s context) Action Tendencies Mediated by Sociocultural elaboration (Dynamic capabilities) Sociocultural reproduction (Capabilities)

Applying the Morphogenetic Approach to Organizational Capabilities

Applying the Morphogenetic Approach to Zooniverse

Method

 23 semi-structured qualitative interviews taken from

the Zooniverse team, taped and transcribed

 Respondents included managers, software

designers, programmers, education officers and scientists,

 Thematic analysis with the help of NVIVO  Sentiment analysis using KNIME

Summary of Findings

Snapshot of findings

Zooniverse attributes Some Useful Quotes Work environment  Informal  Flexible  Learning culture  Responsive  Distributed leadership (to some extent)  Not overly bureaucratic  Fun

It’s a great work environment and it’s super interesting. Everything’s always moving forward quickly and changing so it’s pretty fun There’s not a super formal, “This is who you report to every day.” We all work together and just collaborate on things and it’s very free, in that if there’s something that we see that needs building then we’ll figure out who has hand work on it and then we collaborate that way. That we cared enough to make this experience enjoyable and fun and friendly and open, and exciting and – yeah. We actually spent the time to convince a brand new person who comes onto the site that yes, your time will be of value and it will be cherished, and thanks for spending your time here Well, when I started there was no formal organisation around that stuff at all, everyone just did what they could….There is more structure than there was because we need a hierarchy as we get more complicated. But that structure is very inconsistent and even – I was just saying to Mr XX over lunch that I think the structure of what we do has changed since he arrived and that was May or something, so it really is quite fast-

• moving. It just evolves

But at the top of the organisation there’s Mr XX, although that’s less of a steep climb than it was. It used to be that Chris was at the top and then there was a bunch of us doing other things, but now Mr XX is at the top but he’s very much leaning on several people

People  Creative  Empowered  Willing to learn  Reflective  Autonomous  Self-efficacious  Collaborative  Innovative  Open to change

Everyone’s here because they like it, so I think that’s what drives everything forward, it’s just the people who work here want to be here as

• pposed to this is your corporate job, you show up every day and then go home. It seems like everybody wants to be a part of it and I think

that helps drive things forward. Very open-minded, people are willing to listen to you and very open to new ideas. [0:08:19] is cool because there’s always new stuff coming

• ut. So I like that people are always willing to give things a shot. That’s really what I like about it, just the openness to move forward and

experiment with things. Sometimes people will have an idea for a small [0:08:36]. Something that might be useful and they will give you time to build it or experiment with it, which is fun So just to be stuck in your one way of doing things is a huge red flag to me, saying well, I – you know, I did it this way and this is the right way. And just trying to exude that feel of I’m willing to – like not only willing but I’m kind of constantly attempting to learn new things. The freedom to learn new things. And not just coming in and writing the exact same things in the exact same technology, get you out for your entire employment [0.25.13] they’ll change all that.

Zooniverse Capabilities Evolution Framework

Individual Resources

Learning Reflexivity Pragmatism Competent Self-efficacious

Structure

Flexible Decentralized Autonomy Resources availability Distributed leadership

Culture

Promote new ideas Quality driven Transparency and trust Professional ethos

Individual’s context for action Users

User behaviour valuable Sense of ownership Improved user experience Increased user engagement Respect Make good use of users’ time Aligning goals with users

Action Tendencies

Innovative Creative Open to change Collaborative

Mediated by Incremental Innovation

Inscribed in: Improved practices, service (fixing bugs etc.)

Radical Innovation

Inscribed in: New projects, services, products such as new games etc.

Capabilities evolution through

T1 T2 T3 T4

Discussion

 Climate of contextual discontinuity (CCD) conditions

creativity and innovation

 Users help to shape CCD  Structural context only shapes action, individuals

exercise a degree of agency

 Capabilities resides in the flow of interaction

between context and individual properties, both affect each other reciprocally

 Capabilities evolution can be top bottom as well as

bottom up

Contribution and Implication

 Micro-foundations of dynamic capabilities  Organizational and personal characteristics required to

efficiently extract value from the crowd

 Interactional dynamics between the individuals and the

• rganization in the context of crowd organization

 New understanding on the “unintended consequences”

• f engaging the crowd and the “unanticipated role” of

the crowd

 “Born virtual” business model for sustainable

performance

Thank you